🍄 Rewriting the Periodic Table

Why Chemistry’s Most Iconic Grid Needs a Reboot.

Apr 25, 2025

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Listen to Memory Fade
🎧 Alice podcasts
📘 Alice books

Imagine this: it’s the year 2030. The periodic table, once the static gospel of chemistry, now looks more like a kinetic sculpture designed by an architect who moonlights as a quantum sci-fi novelist. In one corner of the lab, a holographic spiral pulses and in another, a Christmas-tree-shaped 3D model spins like a rogue AI dreaming in elemental code. This isn’t speculative fiction—it’s where we're heading. Why? Because the periodic table—the table, the grid, the sacred schematic of everything—is cracking under its own legacy. Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Feels like the periodic chart has met its "Don-Ingber-tensegrity-moment!"

The periodic table was once a static relic of the 19th century, a rigid grid of atomic inevitability. Now, it morphs, warps, adapts—an evolving codex of known and unknown matter. In microgravity, the heavyweights float free of their terrestrial constraints, their isotopic half-lives stretching and twisting in the low-energy void. Beyond Earth, the extraterrestrial periodic table hums with materials that never formed in our planetary forge—exotic superfluid elements pooling in the crevices of asteroids, metallic hydrogen lattices under the ice of Enceladus. Meanwhile, down here, the table has become a playground: superheroes imbue their powers into fictional isotopes (Adamantium, Vibranium, Nth metal), and the great pantheon of science fiction continues to mine new materials from the imaginative deep. There’s a periodic table of food, where umami and terroir slot into atomic positions; a periodic table of health, where dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol reign as elemental forces of human chemistry. Poets, too, have their say—haikus refract the essence of each element into seventeen syllables of meaning. And in Australia, First Nations knowledge is rewriting the chart, integrating ancient wisdom with the Western atomic canon, linking compounds to the cycles of land and sky. The table is no longer a monolith—it is an ecosystem, a map of possibilities, still unfolding.

Let’s rewind

Dmitri Mendeleev didn’t just categorize elements in 1869; he predicted the unknown, leaving blank spaces for what was yet to come. Fast forward: atomic numbers arrived, noble gases parachuted into place, and Glenn Seaborg synthesized a whole family of postwar elements with names straight out of a Cold War sci-fi novel (americium! einsteinium!). But here’s the kicker: we’re still discovering elements. Element 119 is on the horizon. 120 is within range. Scientists are cooking atoms in particle accelerators like they're hosting Iron Chef: Quantum Edition. And yet... we’re still using a 2D chart that belongs on a classroom wall, not in the engine room of a starship.

Why this matters

In an era where synthetic biology, space mining, and AI-designed materials are imminent, the periodic table isn’t just a school chart—it’s a design framework for matter. It's time for chemistry to leave its analog cage and join the post-linear imagination economy. Redesigning the periodic table isn’t a vanity project. It’s a cognitive toolset reboot. Think of it as upgrading from Google Maps to Star Maps.

When you shift how matter is mapped, you unlock:
New classes of functional materials (quantum batteries, bioresonant alloys, programmable matter)

Cross-disciplinary fusion between data visualization, physics, materials science, and art.

A new cultural literacy where understanding matter becomes a form of fluency for everyone from fashion designers to biohackers.

The call to action

If you're in R&D, materials innovation, education, or brand strategy, now is the time to engage with this elemental renaissance. Back new periodic table models. Prototype interactive versions. Host think tanks that imagine the next 50 elements. Fuse aesthetics and science. Because here's the truth: the periodic table wasn’t meant to be a static monument—it’s a living map of human curiosity. And right now, the map is redrawing itself. Welcome to the Periodic Table Ad Infinitum.

Thought from the future…
“We didn’t just reshape the elements—we let them reshape us.
Let’s co-create the new order of matter.”
—ALICE, dreaming in isotopes and futures

What else we are wandering…

🔬1% chemical compounds
Although only around 1% of chemical compounds have been discovered, scientists continue to explore new possibilities by studying both natural environments and extreme conditions like deep space or hydrothermal vents, where even noble gases like argon can form compounds such as ArH⁺. Chemists often modify existing compounds or reactions—swapping atoms or using new starting materials—to search for “known unknowns,” but discovering “unknown unknowns” requires creativity, curiosity, and sometimes luck. Natural sources like moulds, plants, or insects have historically led to breakthroughs, such as penicillin, whose unusual square-shaped atomic structure was revealed using X-ray crystallography. Even with advanced tools, synthesizing a newly imagined compound remains a significant challenge, requiring not just theoretical knowledge but also the ability to recreate the precise conditions needed for it to exist. (via The Conversation)

∈ Element 115
Officially named moscovium after its 2003 discovery by Russian scientists in Dubna, it is a man-made, superheavy element with 115 protons, created in particle accelerators and lasting only fractions of a second before decaying. Its fleeting existence and placement near the theoretical "island of stability" has fueled scientific intrigue—and fringe theories. Decades before it was added to the periodic table in 2016, Element 115 was popularized by Bob Lazar, who in 1989 claimed he worked at the secretive Area 51 site, reverse-engineering alien spacecraft powered by a stable form of this element. While Lazar’s account has never been fully verified or debunked, nuclear scientists like Jacklyn Gates affirm that current isotopes of moscovium decay far too quickly to be used for UFO propulsion, contradicting Lazar’s claims. Still, some like filmmaker Jeremy Corbell maintain that a more stable isotope, like Lazar allegedly encountered, could exist or be synthesized in the future. (via HowStuffWorks)

🥗 The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI)
PTFI is providing democratized tools, data, and training to evaluate the quality of the world’s food supply for a global ecosystem scientists, practitioners, consumers, and policymakers. The PTFI is leveraging food composition data as a key resource in the development of solutions for planetary health through three pathways: evaluating the effects of climate change on foods, developing evidence for scaling regenerative agriculture and agroecology, and informing the development of diets for the mitigation of diet-related chronic disease.

The Periodic Table of Fictional Metals and Alloys
A vibrant and interactive experience for fans of pop culture and materials science alike, it features everything from Wolverine’s indestructible claws to the doors of Doctor Who’s TARDIS, the table is a delightful exploration of imagination infused with metallurgical flair. Bodycote, a leader in heat treatment technologies, uses this creative resource to highlight its expertise in enhancing the performance of metals and alloys—critical materials in both real and fictional worlds. (Bodycote)

꠫ Elemental Haiku
A poetic take on the periodic table, Mary Soon Lee’s Elemental Haiku contains a three-line haiku composed for each element of the periodic table.

🎶 Musical Periodic Chart
Mechanical engineer Asegun Henry is translating every element in the periodic table into unique musical signatures, offering scientists a novel tool to analyze the shifting molecular structures of matter and helping the public “hear” the Universe in motion. Based at Georgia Tech, Henry is mapping the vibrations of atoms—normally occurring at frequencies far beyond human hearing—into audible sound, revealing how different elements "sing" based on their atomic behavior, such as density and thermal conductivity. The Sound of Crystalline Silicon

🧠 Brain Cell Periodic Table
Stanford Medicine researchers have developed a novel approach to understanding psychiatric disorders by creating a “periodic table” of brain cells, akin to the chemical periodic table, which maps specific cell types to psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia. By integrating two vast public databases—one identifying genes linked to psychiatric disorders and the other detailing gene activity across brain cell types and regions—the team has pinpointed specific brain cells and regions implicated in schizophrenia. (Stanford Medicine, 2025)

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts